Nucleation of bulk superconductivity close to critical magnetic field (Q616882)

This paper is concerned with the qualitative analysis of the minimizers of the Ginzburg--Landau functional in the asymptotic regime \(\kappa\rightarrow\infty\) and \( H = \kappa +o(\kappa)\), which corresponds to type II superconductors subject to an applied magnetic field \(H\) close to the critical field \(H_{C_2}\). The main results of the present paper determine the leading order term in the energy expansion and indicate the optimal regime for the magnetic field \(H\). The authors establish that the leading order behavior of the energy is determined according to variations of \(H -\kappa\) on the critical scale \(\sqrt\kappa\). The proofs combine variational methods with related elliptic estimates and asymptotic analysis tools.